{"id":878,"date":"2013-01-05T14:55:41","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T20:55:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2013\/01\/05\/130105-elizabethcook\/"},"modified":"2022-04-07T16:05:28","modified_gmt":"2022-04-07T21:05:28","slug":"130105-elizabethcook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2013\/01\/05\/130105-elizabethcook\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Cooks…musically speaking, that is"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you don’t listen to the Outlaw Country channel on Sirius XM*, you are likely not familiar with Elizabeth Cook, who hosts a daily program called Apron Strings<\/a>**<\/i>. Like most of the on-air “personalities” on that channel, she’s also a professional musician, and an intriguing one at that.<\/p>\n

I think of her as Carrie Underwood’s evil twin. Both are blond and beautiful, with a blue-collar, small town upbringing and college degrees in non-music fields – Underwood: mass communication and journalism; Cook: accounting (yay!) and computer information systems (double yay!). That’s where the similarity ends. Cook’s music has a non-Nashville-slick sound and an occasional (frequent?) dark streak that makes it an acquired taste…and one that I’ve acquired.<\/p>\n

She writes some edgy lyrics, like these from El Camino<\/i> (about a guy who drives a 1972 “funky-a**” refurb), an ode to a decidedly non-yuppie relationship:<\/p>\n

After Saturday matinee roller derby<\/i>
\nWe went parking and things got blurry<\/i>
\nI thought man I can’t get much hotter<\/i>
\nAnd then I caught a whiff of pi\u00f1a colada<\/i>
\nAnd we were making love in the disco era<\/i>
\nAnd he was Travolta and I was Farrah<\/i>
\nI was like man what is happening here<\/i>
\nDude must of put a quaalude in my beer<\/i>
\nIf I wake up married, I’ll have to annul it<\/i>
\nRight now my hands are in his mullet<\/i><\/p>\n

It takes a special kind of mind to think about rhyming “annul it” with “mullet” and have it make perfect sense.<\/p>\n

Here are a couple of songs that capture the essence of Elizabeth Cook. Both are from her album Welder<\/a><\/i>, the title being a tribute to her father’s occupation.<\/p>\n